Comics...what are they good for?

I had collected comics when I was younger and always enjoyed browsing them. My daughter now has that collection and she enjoys them now in much the same way I did. But comics were never "rich enough" compared to real books, and the stories always felt short and disrupted. Recently however a friend of mine who is a professor of the history of french comic books recommended a graphic novel called "Alan's War". This is a true story of an american GI's experience in Europe during WWII and his expatriate years following the war are truly gripping. They are told in first person and I have to say, I'm now a fan of the comic book.

Additionally, I have always been wary of using comics to facilitate UX excercises.  They seemed like too much work for too little pay off. But I must say the gift of comics is that they let you visually tell any story you want and portray subjects at any time in any place. You can't do that easily with any other visual tool. Drawing is the ultimate creative tool isn't it? The storyboards you portray in UX comics can be about expected outcomes, functional use cases, audience reactions to experiences or journeys through interface screens, allow stakeholders to think of and frame experiences and problems in new ways that are aligned to reality and keep the focus on the human factors at play.

I look forward to reading more graphic novels (I just bought a new one called "Photographer" from the same artist) and to experiment with comics as a UX tool.